President Donald Trump tapped Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, to join his legal defense team as the Senate gets ready to launch its impeachment trial against him.
After the announcement, Trump's old comments about Starr resurfaced, in which he called Starr a "freak" and suggested "he's got something in his closet."
In 1999, he told MSNBC: "I think Ken Starr is a lunatic, I really think that Ken Starr is a disaster. I really think that Ken Starr was terrible."
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President Donald Trump tapped Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, to represent him in his upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate.
Starr led the impeachment proceedings against Clinton in the 1990s. At the time, Trump had some interesting opinions about Starr.
"Starr's a freak," Trump told The New York Times in 1999. "I bet he's got something in his closet."
That same year, he told MSNBC: "I think Ken Starr is a lunatic, I really think that Ken Starr is a disaster. I really think that Ken Starr was terrible."
At the time, Trump was a supporter of Clinton. Starr wrote the so-called Starr Report in 1998 that led to Clinton's impeachment. The document listed 11 possible impeachable offenses, including abuse of power, perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice.
Starr has been accused of going on a fishing expedition during the investigation, which began as a probe of the Clinton family's real-estate dealings and expanded to include lurid details of the president's sex life.
He also drew some criticism for explicitly detailing the sexual encounters Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky, who at the time was a young White House intern. Lewinsky has said the negative publicity and bullying she endured during and after Clinton's impeachment made her feel like a "poster child for public humiliation."
Robert Ray, who worked with Starr during Clinton's impeachment, will also be representing Trump in his impeachment trial.
On Friday, after it surfaced that Starr and Ray would be on Trump's legal team and would likely be making the opposite case from what they argued in Clinton's impeachment, Lewinsky seemed to weigh in.
"[T]his is definitely an 'are you f------ kidding me?' kinda day," she tweeted.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump's legal team will also include Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard emeritus law professor and constitutional and criminal law scholar. He confirmed his involvement in the impeachment trial Friday, tweeting that he was "participating in this impeachment trial to defend the integrity of the Constitution and to prevent the creation of a dangerous constitutional precedent."
Dershowitz has represented controversial figures in the past. He defended OJ Simpson in the 1990s, and he also represented the billionaire and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Last year, Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's accusers sued Dershowitz alleging that she was forced to have sex with him when she was underage and recruited to work in Epstein's sex trafficking ring (Dershowitz has repeatedly denied the allegation).
The judge in the lawsuit he's defending from Giuffre ordered him to submit an extensive response to the allegations by February 7.
Trump's legal team will be spearheaded by the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone. In addition to him, Dershowitz, Starr, and Ray, it will also include Jay Sekulow, Trump's personal defense attorney, and Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida.SEE ALSO: Trump's defense team in his Senate impeachment trial will include Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr
Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: A law professor weighs in on how Trump could beat impeachment

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President Donald Trump's legal team said the articles of impeachment against him are "deficient" in a...

President Donald Trump's legal team said the articles of impeachment against him are "deficient" in a fiery response ahead of his trial in the Senate.
Speaking ahead of a formal defense filing, sources working with Trump's legal team told reporters in a briefing that the charges should be tossed out because they are "frivolous and dangerous and "constitutionally invalid."
Trump's defense is hobbled, however, by the slew of documentary evidence, witness testimony, and even the president's own statements, that support the impeachment charges.
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President Donald Trump's legal team filed a response to charges accusing him of abusing his power and obstructing Congress on Monday, saying the articles of impeachment are "deficient" and should be thrown out.
Speaking ahead of the filing, sources working with Trump's legal team said during a background briefing on Monday that the charges are "frivolous and dangerous," and that they fail to cite any legal violations.
The sources did not say whether they would ask for a motion to dismiss the charges, but did say the case should be rejected, arguing that the "articles of impeachment are deficient on their face."
The 110-page legal briefing was filed to the Senate on Monday and pushed back on House Democrats' allegations that Trump abused his power.
At the center of the impeachment inquiry are Trump's efforts to strongarm Ukraine's government into pursuing investigations that would politically benefit him, while withholding vital military aid and a White House meeting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately sought.
The president's pressure campaign also included forcing the abrupt ouster of Marie Yovanovitch, formerly the US's ambassador to Ukraine, because she stood in the way of Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as they worked to get the Ukrainian government to dig up or manufacture political dirt against former Vice President Joe Biden, who is a 2020 Democratic frontrunner.
Trump's actions first came to light in an anonymous whistleblower's complaint that a US intelligence official filed in August. The complaint detailed a July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky during which the US president repeatedly pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to work with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Bidens, as well as a bogus conspiracy theory suggesting Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help Democrats.
But a string of public testimony from career, nonpartisan government officials since then revealed that the phone call was just one data point in a months-long effort to bully Ukraine into caving to Trump's demands.
The contents of the whistleblower complaint were corroborated by a White House memo summarizing the July 25 phone call, and Trump himself said several times — in public — that he wanted Ukraine to probe the Bidens.
Moreover, Gordon Sondland, the US's ambassador to the European Union, testified to Congress that "everyone," including senior officials like former national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and more, was in the loop on what Trump was doing.
Additional reporting and documents since the House impeached Trump in December revealed that there was widespread concern across lower levels of the government, including in the State Department and the Pentagon, about the legality of the president's actions.
Monday's filing comes after Trump's legal team filed another short document over the weekend calling the articles of impeachment "constitutionally invalid."
The more comprehensive filing on Monday expanded on that claim, but sources working with Trump's legal team declined to lay out the specifics during the briefing.
Trump will be represented at trial by White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, and other attorneys expected to take part include Ken Starr, Alan Dershowitz, Pam Bondi, Jane Serene Raskin, Eric Herschmann and Robert Ray.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to allot 24 hours per side to statements in the trial, which must be confined into two working days, according to NBC News.
Read more:
Trump's Russia adviser was escorted from the White House after 2 months on the job, as part of a mysterious security probe
Trump reportedly picked his impeachment defense team based on how well he thinks they can perform on TV
The White House called the Democrats' impeachment case against Trump a 'dangerous attack' in its first formal response
Trump's defense team in his Senate impeachment trial will include Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr
Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: A law professor weighs in on how Trump could beat impeachment